The Comics Bureau

Check out these fant­astic clos­eups of old com­ics. Really gor­geous stuff.

If the word ‘Scan­la­tion’ is a new one to you, head over to Inside Scan­la­tion to find out what it is all about.

Scan­la­tion has always found itself in a moral gray area. While pub­lish­ers and other pro­fes­sion­als tend to see scan­la­tion as copy­right infringe­ment and a threat to sales, fans and scan­lat­ors defend their actions by point­ing out that scan­la­tion helps raise aware­ness of lesser known Japan­ese titles that might oth­er­wise go unnoticed. In some cases, scan­la­tion helps build hype for a pop­u­lar series before its release. Scan­lat­ors often scan­late unli­censed manga, some­thing many fans con­sider com­pletely accept­able. There are even rumors of pub­lish­ers decid­ing which manga to license next based on the pop­ular­ity of scan­lated manga.

The pur­pose of this fea­ture is to provide a (hope­fully) com­pre­hens­ive his­tory of the world of scan­la­tion, not to argue as to the leg­al­ity of scan­la­tion. What you will find here are facts and stor­ies told by people who have been involved in the scan­la­tion scene, some act­ive and some retired. Of course, all art­icles deal­ing with scan­la­tion inev­it­ably find them­selves con­tain­ing sens­it­ive (to some degree) inform­a­tion and links. The pur­pose of this art­icle is to provide a his­tory and over­view of the scan­la­tion world, noth­ing more.

I don’t know about any­one else, but the typo­graphy in scan­la­tions nearly always makes me angry.

Head over to the Digital Com­ics Museum, which is run by the very same folk that have been run­ning the Golden Age Com­ics site.

We are the #1 site for down­load­ing FREE pub­lic domain Golden Age Com­ics. All files here have been researched by our staff and users to make sure they are copy­right free and in the pub­lic domain

Want a tip? Check out Jack Cole’s Plastic Man. I’ve pos­ted about Jack Cole before, so if you missed it, have a read.

An inter­est­ing 119 year old art­icle about the rise of the ‘comic paper’ by David Ander­son that appeared in the Magazine of Art vol 14 in 1891.

From Calvin & Hobbes: Magic on Paper is a col­lec­tion of Bill Watterson’s early strips while at col­lege for Ohio’s Kenyon Col­lege news­pa­per, The Kenyon Collegian.

I don’t think I’ve ever met any­one who didn’t love Calvin & Hobbes.

Paul Gravett writes up a brief his­tory of the graphic novel,

To know where we are going to, we need to know where we’ve come from. This is true of our lives as well as our cul­ture. In the case of the com­ics medium, its date of birth used to be hotly con­tested. Twenty years ago, on Octo­ber 30th 1989, it was finally to be decided at a his­toric sum­mit or “Incon­tri” organ­ised by the Lucca Com­ics Fest­ival in Italy. When the inter­na­tional jury con­vened to determ­ine which was the first major char­ac­ter, all but one mem­ber gave in to Amer­ican lob­by­ing and signed an agree­ment select­ing The Yel­low Kid, cre­ated by Richard F. Out­cault and pub­lished in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Worldnews­pa­per. Below is Por­tuguese expert Vasco Granja’s copy of the agree­ment which is trans­lated along these lines:

“The eleven inter­na­tional spe­cial­ists, gathered in Lucca, estab­lish by abso­lute major­ity that 1896 was the year of birth of the com­ics. This was the year in which, through the char­ac­ter of The Yel­low Kid, the com­ics, assum­ing the express­ive con­tri­bu­tions provided pre­vi­ously by cre­at­ors from vari­ous coun­tries, launched those spe­cial lin­guistic char­ac­ter­ist­ics which would trans­form it into a new medium of communication.”

I don’t know if you noticed, but see how Denis Gif­ford signed his name ‘Ally Sloper 1876′, sig­nalling his dis­sent at the agree­ment that the Yel­low Kid was the birth of com­ics. Check out the Early Com­ics Archive to read more Ally Sloper.

This has been doing the rounds recently, but I thought I’d post it up any­way. From Mon­sters & Rockets;

Nobody who has read Richard McGuire’s 1989 comic stri­pHere has ever for­got­ten it. (Ori­gin­ally prin­ted in Raw: Vol. 2, Num­ber 1, it’s more recently been reprin­ted in Ivan Brunetti’s An Antho­logy of Graphic Fic­tion, Car­toons and True Stor­ies and in the eighth issue of Comic Art. ) A truly mind-bending work, the strip jumps around in time but not in space, show­ing us vari­ous events occur­ring on a little patch of land over the course of bil­lions of years.Here is form­ally dar­ing but also sur­pris­ingly mov­ing, drop­ping us into ran­dom moments in the lives of the people who have called “here” their home.

I’ve been a big fan of the strip for years, but I had no idea that it had inspired a short film. This is appar­ently a stu­dent work, but it’s hardly ama­teur­ish. To say it’s per­haps half as good as the ori­ginal is not a bad thing when the ori­ginal is this great. Still, I strongly sug­gest you read the ori­ginal on this site before watch­ing the film. You’ll never look at your home in quite the same way again.

Craig Fisc­her over at Thought Bal­loon­ists writes up an inter­est­ing art­icle on Osamu Tezuka’s film influ­ences fol­low­ing what sounds like an enjoy­able read of Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Com­ics: Osamu Tezuka and the Cre­ation of Post-World War II Manga (2009)

Most inter­est­ing to me, though, was Power’s claim that “images inspired by deep-focus cine­ma­to­graphy are par­tic­u­larly char­ac­ter­istic” of Tezuka’s car­toon­ing in Met­ro­polis (God 56). I’m more than a little obsessed with deep focus, and in this post I want to explore and expand on Power’s claim. I’ll begin by defin­ing deep focus and sum­mar­iz­ing Andre Bazin’s per­cep­tual and philo­soph­ical argu­ments for its import­ance; then I’ll look closely at Power’s examples of deep focus in Met­ro­polis. Finally, I’ll ques­tion if it’s accur­ate to talk about a comic (by Tezuka or any other car­toon­ist) hav­ing depth of field in the same way that a film does.

From the always-fascinating Prelinger Archive

From Dan Archer & Nikil Saval over at Archcomix.com is The Hon­duran Coup — A Graphic His­tory. Check the site out for more comix to be fea­tured on this site soon.